With the proliferation of cellular communications systems, consumers expect to receive a rich variety of services. Mobile operators have to provide their wireless customers with a wide range of the services. These generally take the form of consumer applications. In many cases, the deployed services are serviced by the mobile operators as well as third party (value added) providers. The services provided by mobile operators are generally referred to as enabler services. The third party or value added services are built on the foundation of the enabler services and often provide richer applications to the user.
As the cellular telecommunications industry provides larger bandwidths to users, there will likely be an increasing need for new communications services. These communications services will be provided by both mobile network operators as well as the third party, value added resellers. These applications may include multimedia services, presence and location services, messaging services, and the like. With the possibility of such a variety of services needing to be developed and deployed, the mobile operators and developers needs to be cognizant of system footprint, integration, interoperability, functional overlap, and shared resource management between these individual services.
Currently, there are various mobile solution service initiatives being pursued for the development of individual network services including, for example, MMSC, WAPG, SMSC, profile databases, and the like. While some commonality exists between applications, each application tends to have its own strategy and implementation for access and management functionalities when using these resources. Accordingly, each service's details make it difficult to deploy and manage complete solutions for a network operator in an easy and efficient manner. Often various hardware and software components need to be individually deployed and managed. This individualized deployment management forces undesired consumption of total allowable footprints, tight expenditures and other cost issues while providing mobile services. Finally, service providers are forced to develop service applications for each unique network. Because of the uniqueness of each network system, service providers are forced to re-implement applications to comport within the constraints of each network.